In addition to the things I’ve written so far, outlining some of the features of my tactical RPG (think “hex-based Fire Emblem/X-Com/Final Fantasy Tactics inspired” cobbler), I want to splice on a larger, strategic layer. That’s another place where the X-Com inspiration comes in. That classic game has a tactical layer (turn based initially, real-time pausable later in the series), but it also has the Geoscape, a strategic layer where base management, research and politics matter. This facilitates a sort of strategic persistence, where decisions you make in the tactical combat echo through the campaign against the aliens and vice versa.

For example, falling behind in research is especially damaging to the war effort, but if your soldiers can’t score some salvage to study, you’re going to fall behind. If you can’t equip them with better gear through research, battlefield acquisition and plain old mercantile action, they won’t work well in the field. If they don’t gain experience and become better soldiers, they won’t keep up. The little decisions you make all over the place add up to a greater whole. (See also: The Rampant Coyote’s Game Design: Small Choices article.)

I like that a good commander needed to keep the bigger picture in mind, and that sometimes, short-term sacrifices needed to be made to make a long-term plan viable. I like that tactics and strategy have their own compartments in the game design (they are different, after all), but that they influence each other in profound ways. That’s the sort of gameplay that can make planning and analysis very rewarding, even as randomization of things like alien attacks makes flexibility valuable. I love that about X-Com, and it’s something I’ve tried to let weigh heavily in my own designs.

So, what sort of large scale conflict I’m thinking of for my game? Well, the short form is “post-apocalyptic DNA soup, where blobs are the dominant life form”. Players choose one of three Blob breeds and deal with their neighbors; the Aspirants, the world’s mental giants (these guys correspond to the Focus strain of previous articles), the Ferals, blobs of the wild (Agility units), and Zomblobs (Strength units), slow, relentless, mindless monsters.

In age-old blob tradition, consume your enemies, or be consumed. Use their strengths as your own and rise to be the dominant species. Build blob bases, claim favorable geography, research the apocalypse and dig for hidden DNA caches to give your group the edge via mutation and adaptation.

I wish I could say this was a functional game. I can do anything on the art and design side, but alas, my coding skills are somewhat… rudimentary. (You can’t do a game like this with HTML and CSS, as it happens.) I’m looking into kickstarter.com to see if I can scrounge up some programmers, and I’ll look around elsewhere, too. I need to nail down some official design documents and mock up some screenshots… but I really want to make this work.

That may well mean that I burn more energy there instead of blogging for a time, but I think I’ve been repeating myself for a while now anyway. It’s about time to do something more constructive… like make a real, functioning game.

I’ll definitely ask for some help testing the thing at some point, though, if I can make it all come together in playable form. You’ll hear about it here as soon as I have something.

…my only fear is that most players will want to play as the Zomblobs, and those poor Aspirants and Ferals will be undertested. 😉

[…] My Zomblobs! is a game designed in shells. There are layers to the design, allowing for a “bird’s eye” game experience with little micromanaging, all the way down to a Civilization-like world conquering game with a Tactical RPG layer, between them plenty of opportunities to min-max your way into gaming geek happiness. […]

Some more random questions:
I bumped into this (http://sinisterdesign.net/?p=914) article which pretty much only left me with the question, do you intend/want to include terrain manipulation, destruction, or deforming?
Are you intending to make your game multiplayer?
And finally, as you’ve noted, the UI would be fairly important. Is that something you are trying to design? I’m actually rather curious if game companies have someone who specializes in such a thing. Who does design those UIs?

I would *love* to include terrain manipulation. Probably not complete destruction, and it would probably be in the shape of local temporary auras… unless I can work in multiple elevations, in which case I’d definitely like to make some terrain changeable. For example, that granite cliff might not be all that malleable, but a sand dune could be shoved around or a dirt road might be changed by blast damage. A map editor would be fantastic, too. Admittedly, those are “wish list” items, but they *are* on the list.

Multiplayer, definitely. I want a strong single player backbone, but multiplayer would be where it would get long legs, I think. That’s part of why I want to make each faction playable. If it were single player, and I was going to lock the player into the Aspirants who have to deal with the others, I could hack some stuff behind the scenes. So I’m aiming higher there, too, but I think it’s for the better.

I am designing the UI, but I intend to have others test it. Where I work during the day, our smallish studio doesn’t have a UI specialist, since it’s not something we’re doing constantly, but bigger studios do have them. It really does require development time on its own. We just have a designer handle the backbone of our UI and an artist and programmer to back him/her up.

For myself, since I’m kind of doing, well, everything, I’ll rely on usability tests to hammer it out.

Thanks for the questions and article link, by the way. That really is a great article.